Deep Learning Analysis of COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy and Confidence Expressed on Twitter in 6 High-Income Countries: Longitudinal Observational Study

Abstract

Background An ongoing monitoring of national and subnational trajectory of COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy could offer support in designing tailored policies on improving vaccine uptake. Objective We aim to track the temporal and spatial distribution of COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy and confidence expressed on Twitter during the entire pandemic period in major English-speaking countries. Methods We collected 5,257,385 English-language tweets regarding COVID-19 vaccination between January 1, 2020, and June 30, 2022, in 6 countries—the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and Ireland. Transformer-based deep learning models were developed to classify each tweet as intent to accept or reject COVID-19 vaccination and the belief that COVID-19 vaccine is effective or unsafe. Sociodemographic factors associated with COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy and confidence in the United States were analyzed using bivariate and multivariable linear regressions. Results The 6 countries experienced similar evolving trends of COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy and confidence. On average, the prevalence of intent to accept COVID-19 vaccination decreased from 71.38% of 44,944 tweets in March 2020 to 34.85% of 48,167 tweets in June 2022 with fluctuations. The prevalence of believing COVID-19 vaccines to be unsafe continuously rose by 7.49 times from March 2020 (2.84% of 44,944 tweets) to June 2022 (21.27% of 48,167 tweets). COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy and confidence varied by country, vaccine manufacturer, and states within a country. The democrat party and higher vaccine confidence were significantly associated with lower vaccine hesitancy across US states. Conclusions COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy and confidence evolved and were influenced by the development of vaccines and viruses during the pandemic. Large-scale self-generated discourses on social media and deep learning models provide a cost-efficient approach to monitoring routine vaccine hesitancy.